How the Star's Queen's Park bureau juggles coverage of all three major parties

This story is part of the Star’s trust initiative, where, every week, we take readers behind the scenes of our journalism. This week, we look at how the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau balances the demands of covering three major political parties.

Since Patrick Brown resigned as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives over sexual misconduct allegations just over two weeks ago, the troubles facing the party have been top stories in the Toronto Star every day.

The upheaval rocking the official Opposition — which has also seen Rick Dykstra resign as party president in the face of sexual assault allegations, and investigations into suspect membership lists and questionable party spending in the Brown era — has made for a busy time for the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau.

Add to that the PC’s rush to elect a new leader ahead of this summer’s provincial election at a time when the sitting Liberals are set to table their 2018 budget, and readers might wonder how the bureau is able to juggle covering all three parties thoroughly and fairly.

“Adrenalin and caffeine help,” says Robert Benzie, the Queen’s Park bureau chief, who along with fellow reporters Rob Ferguson and Kristin Rushowy, and columnist Martin Regg Cohn, work to hold Ontario’s elected officials to account and keep the public informed.

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In the race to replace Brown, each of the leadership hopefuls — Christine Elliott, Doug Ford and Caroline Mulroney — have their supporters and detractors keenly observing how much press their candidate is getting.

“Any one of them could be the next premier of Ontario, so we have to take them all very seriously,” said Benzie in an interview, noting that he strives for equal coverage of all candidates. “It’s early days yet, but for example, there’s a leadership debate next week and we will cover it. It doesn’t mean that every candidate will get exactly the same number of words in the story, but we try to give them equal time.”

The fact that all three leadership candidates have greater-than-usual name recognition hasn’t affected how the bureau is covering the leadership race, says Benzie, but it has generated intense reader interest.

“Christine Elliott is a known commodity given that this is her third run at the leadership, and her late husband, Jim Flaherty, ran twice before. Caroline Mulroney is the eldest child of a very famous Canadian political figure, and Doug Ford is a well-known Toronto councillor and brother to the late ex-mayor of Toronto Rob Ford,” he said. “So you have three big names in a race and that is always interesting.”

How does the bureau cope with balancing the demands of covering the PC party with the demands of covering the other two major political parties?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Liberals and the New Democrats have been content lately to go to ground and let the turmoil in the PC party, currently led by interim leader Vic Fedeli, consume the headlines.

“It’s an old political axiom that when your opponents are pouring gasoline on themselves and lighting a match, you stand back,” said Benzie. “I think Mr. Fedeli has done a good job in terms of making changes from the Brown era, but if you’re the Liberals or the New Democrats, you just want to say stand back, and let the Tories do their thing. Then, after the dust settles, come in and shoot the wounded.”

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The Star’s trust committee periodically hears from readers who perceive the newspaper’s political coverage as biased in favour of the Liberals. Since 1987, the Star’s editorial board, which operates separately from the newsroom, has endorsed the Liberals in every provincial election, except in 1999 when the newspaper endorsed Howard Hampton’s NDP. But any suggestion that this affects how the newspaper’s Queen’s Park reporters do their jobs is nonsense, says Benzie.

“I used to work for the Toronto Sun and the National Post and I’m the same reporter that I was then. I didn’t care about the editorials at those outlets and I don’t care about the editorials at the Star,” he said.

Ferguson agreed: “I used to cover Queen’s Park for The Canadian Press during the last months of Bob Rae and the beginning of Mike Harris’s government. No one called me a Liberal hack back then.”

Ferguson points out that he spent all of September, October and November of last year covering two political corruption trials involving the Liberals — the byelection bribery trial in Sudbury and the gas plants trial in Toronto. He added the Star was one of the few media organizations to attend the gas plants trial every day.

Rushowy, who joined Queen’s Park a year-and-a-half ago, stressed that bureau reporters do their best to get voices from all three major parties in stories, as the parties all have elected representatives at Queen’s Park.

“We try to give readers as many viewpoints as possible,” she said.

At the end of the day, says Benzie, it would be detrimental to the Star’s ability to cover politics if any reporters were seen to be leaning toward any party.

“You don’t want anyone thinking you’re a Liberal or Tory or NDP hack, because then the other two parties won’t talk to you,” he said, adding he does not vote in any elections. “We take this place seriously and because we do, we are taken seriously.”

The Star’s Trust Initiative is eager to hear from readers. Do you have any questions about how we do our journalism? What are some topics you’d like to see us write about? Send us a note with your thoughts to trust@thestar.ca.